Scholarship with Scholar's Terms of Use: an oxymoron.

Scholar is a new social networking feature offered through
LTU's Blackboard recently. Accepting the Terms of Use would be
difficult for me. I am in no way an attorney and these are not
legal opinions but my personal likes and dislikes.

Opting out of the ads is not allowed. So the search for
knowledge is slowed by the loading of ads, the advertised
items can be perceived to be endorsed by the University or
by the scholar, and the order in which search results is
returned is tainted by the suspicion of weighting by
advertisers.

Scholar seems to preserve the right to use your material
in "perpetuity" even if you quit Scholar.

Even though Scholar takes no responsibility for your
postings it says it has the right to have you pay any costs
it incurs while defending itself if your content offends
anyone at all.

Most importantly, scholarship implies the right and obligation to
correct, amend and otherwise modify materials and ideas while giving
proper attribution to previous contributors. Scholar seems to
be only concerned with copyright preservation. Perhaps there
should be some other name for this new service?